
Class r 1 -4 4 



Cop}iight N°. 



CflRMGHT DEPOSIE 



:jiEWAi(K^ 



NEWARK 

A SERIES OF ENGRAVINGS ON WOOD BY 
%lJDOLTH 1{UZICKA 

WITH AN APPRECIATION OF 

THE PICTORIAL ASPECTS OF THE TOWN 

BY WALTER PRICHARD EATON 




THE CARTERET BOOK CLUB 

J^E WA K K^ ' :\E fV JET^SEY 

1917 



>NkErf6' 



Copyright, igiy, by the Carteret Book Club 



©C. A 5 .'! f, 2 

JUL -I !Si9 



CONTE:NiTS 

Page 

^ 'Definition of T^idureKjUe 3 

The Spell of "Broad Street 11 

ground the Four Corners 21 

<tA Bit of Virgin %iyer-Bank 29 

The Crowd of /Jumble T{ooff 34. 

In T raise of Trees (S Open Spaces 41 

Over the 3V[arshes ^y 



F01{EW0T{p 

MR. Eaton tells us that he gives us in this book the re- 
sults ot his study of Newark's pidlorial manifestations; 
and that he was able to bring to that study a certain freshness 
of vision because, knowing nothing of that city, he saw it pre- 
cisely as it is, without the glamour, the apology, or the explana- 
tion which social, historical, or sentimental associations would 
give to it. It was precisely because Mr. Eaton could thus write 
of the Newark of to-day unhampered by knowledge of its story 
and by feeling for its peculiar quality, that the Carteret Club 
asked him to prepare for it a presentment of Newark in words 
to accompany Mr. Ruzicka's presentment in line and color. 
This mental and emotional detachment was not the sole 
reason, however, for the seleftion of Mr. Eaton. He had already 
prepared a text to accompany a series of engravings of New 
York city which Mr. Ruzicka had executed for the Grolier 
Club, and therein made it plain, as he had on many other occa- 
sions, that he sees the world, much as does the artist, in a series 
of pi6f ures, and that the pictures which he sees he can set forth 
in words clearly and truly and with just that touch which makes 
of the result, though full of hints at poetic images and of pic- 
torial suggestions, a clear straightforward prose. That is to say, 
the Club had asked Mr. Ruzicka to visit Newark and reproduce 
in a group of engravings such aspedls of the city as appealed 
to him. Quite naturally, then, wishing to add to the pidures an 

: ix ] 



FOT{EWOT{p 

appropriate text, it asked Mr. Eaton also to visit Newark and 
reproduce in words such of its pi6lorial asped:s as moved him 
to expression. 

The Carteret Book Club was born of that love of fine printing 
and beautiful books which was long held and wisely indulged 
by the late James E. Howell, Vice-Chancellor of New Jersey, 
Trustee of the Newark Library, and reader of good books. The 
thought of a Book Club which should cultivate the book arts 
and publish now and then an example of thoroughly good book- 
making was long in his mind. It passed from thought to re- 
ality at a conference in the Public Library in December, 1908, 
when the formation of this Club was approved by a group of 
the Vice-Chancellor's friends. The charter, which was filed on 
January 2, 1909, stated that the Club was founded for the lit- 
erary study and promotion of the arts pertaining to the produc- 
tion of books, including the occasional publication of books 
designed to illustrate, promote, and encourage those arts, and 
the acquisition of such property, real and personal, as the Club 
may deem necessary for the promotion of its general purpose, 
with power to acquire and hold objeds of art and curiosity, 
and to provide for and hold exhibitions for the promotion of 
the general objeds of the Club. 

The Club has had about a dozen stated meetings in the eight 
years of its existence, most of them being at informal dinners 

C X ] 



FOT{EWOT{p 

with accompaniments ot modest exhibits of books and prints 
and impromptu discussions ot the book arts and of projedls of 
pubHcation, and has held several more formal exhibits in the 
Public Library. The membership now numbers fifty-eight and 
is limited to eighty, each member holding one of the eighty 
shares of stock and paying modest annual dues. 

The books thus far published, in most cases in editions of one 
hundred copies only, are the following: 

Letters of /Jawthorne to William D. Ticknor^ 1851-1864, 2 v. 
'Vrinted by the Marion Press ^ Jamaica^ New York^ 19 10. 

Letters of Bulwer-Lytton to Mac ready. With an Introdudion by 
Brander Matthews. Printed by D. B. Updike^ The Merry mount 
Press .^ Boston., October , 191 1. 

Criticism., an essay by JValt Whitman. Printed by the Marion 
Press., Jamaica., New Yorli., May^ 1913- 

Charles Dickens, an Appreciation by Charles Dudley Warner. 
Printed by the Marion Press, Jamaica, New York, May, 19 13. 

^ubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. A reprint of the Fourth Edition 
of Fitzgerald' s Translation. With title-page decoration engraved 
on wood by I^udolph I^uzicka. Printed by the Carteret Press, 
Newark, June, 19 15. 

Modern Fine Printing in England and Mr. Bruce I(ogers, by 
Alfred W. Pollard^ with a list of books and other pieces of 
printing designed by Mr. I^ogers. Printed by Carl Purington 
I^ollins, The Dyke Mill, Montague, Massachusetts, 19 16. 



F01{EW0T{p 

At the suggestion of one of the members of the Club it was 
voted, several years ago, to ask Mr. Rudolph Ruzicka to make 
at least one large engraving in colors of a viev^ in Newark which 
he should select. Mr. Ruzicka was present at a later meeting 
and showed tentative sketches that he had made for such an 
engraving. Soon thereafter he was sent to Rome on an engrav- 
ing mission and was absent for many months. Not long after 
his return the Club again took up the subjed: of engravings of 
the city, and decided that they would ask Mr. Ruzicka to make 
four or five large engravings in color and several smaller ones 
in black and white, the latter to serve as head and tail pieces 
for a book on the pidorial aspeds of Newark. 

While Mr. Ruzicka was at work on the engravings for this 
book, the Newark Museum Association, in cooperation with 
this Club, installed an exhibition of his work. This exhibit, in 
its content and its arrangement, proved to be the most satis- 
fadory display of an artist's work that the Museum had ever 
shown. For it Mr. W.M.Ivins, Curator of Prints at the Metro- 
politan Museum of Art, wrote a brief sketch of the develop- 
ment of the art of wood-engraving, with special reference to 
Mr. Ruzicka's work. Of Mr. Ruzicka he said: "The first thing 
which impressed one about his work is its competency, in com- 
petent draughtsmanship, cutting, and printing, a combination 
to-day of very great rarity, which, taken in conjun6tion with 
his remarkable sanity, creates in one the unusual and comfort- 



F0T{EW01{p 

able feeling that here is an artist who knows not only his busi- 
ness but his own mind. ... As well as any man who has ever 
made a woodcut he has learned how to bend it to the creation 
of atmosphere. ... I cannot recall any one who has made a 
fuller or more beautiful record of the modern American sky- 
scraper, which, though the most important and admirable archi- 
tedural invention of the last fifty years, has proved so difficult 
for our painters and etchers. His success in this is based upon 
an honesty and probity of vision which has forced him to the 
invention of a new and adequate formula, an achievement to 
be most seriously considered, as new formulas are rather rare in 
the history of art. ... As a designer of topographical woodcuts 
he has already made noteworthy records of many of the most 
interesting survivals of past times, and has seized in a masterly 
way the beautiful aspeds of this period of stress and growth. 
To his technical competency he has joined a keen sense of the 
very real poetry of the brick and mortar of New York and 
Boston in such a way that it seems not impossible the future 
holds in store for him a position among the makers of great 
prints limited only by his own will." 

The Club having asked Mr. Ruzicka and Mr. Eaton to cooper- 
ate in the produdion of the Newark book, thereupon, on con- 
sultation with both these gentlemen, decided to ask Mr. D. B. 
Updike, The Merrymount Press, Boston, to print the volume. 

C xiii ] 



FOT{EJVO%p 

The publication of this book by a group of Newark men 
is an event that is worth a word of comment. The outUne of 
the adivities of the Carteret Book Club already given does not 
tell how it became possible to establish and maintain such an 
organization in our city; nor why it proved to be so easy for 
the Club to decide that it would publish a book which should, 
it is true, describe and pidure their city, but should pidure it 
very summarily at the hands of an alien artist, should describe 
it very briefly by the pen of an alien man of letters, and should 
be printed in a very limited edition at the press of an alien 
student-printer. 

To tell why these things have here come to pass would be 
to give the whole history of our city. But the publication in 
Newark of this beautiful volume is so notably a mark of a cer- 
tain modest revival in our city of the thought of art and man- 
ners that a little should be said by way of explanation. 

About eighty years ago it was discovered that here was a 
good place for the development of certain industries. There- 
upon the industries came, and the ancient peace of the Puri- 
tan settlement of 1666 was for the first time seriously dis- 
turbed. 

The village grew into a town, the town into a city, the city 
became steadily larger, and in a material way has prospered 
amazingly up to the present day. Many things, which have been 
many times marked down for notice, worked together to the 

C xiv ] 



FOT{EWOT{p 

end that this new, great, growing, and prospering community 
should develop within itself no conscious pride in itself, no local 
attachments, and no ever-present interest in its own dress or 
manners or its own inner life. Many who worked here, and 
many especially of those who used here their brains in the man- 
agement of productive enterprises, lived elsewhere and had else- 
where their local and civic interests ; many who lived here were 
mere daily birds of passage from the great city next door; and 
many who here both lived and worked found their recreations, 
their more intense social activities, their music, their drama, and 
even their more imposing gastronomic diversions in another 
and larger city. 

The result was that Newark, fifteen years ago, was a huge, 
uncouth and unthinking industrial Frankenstein, thrusting its 
unpleasing presence upon its creators, insisting upon being seen, 
but neglected by all so far as the exigencies of life within it 
could permit. 

The change began about twenty years ago, though less than 
fifteen years ago the city was still little more than a squalid 
suburb, rich, noisy, loud, oppressed by railroads, infested by gar- 
bage cans, neglected by its people, and waiting quite patiently 
to be awakened to a sense of shame. 

Conditions are now very dilTerent. Details are here out of 
place, and for the purpose of this introduction it is necessary 
to speak only of the one thing already noted as significant of 

C XV : 



FOT{EWOT{p 

the city's long delayed refledlions on its own possibilities of 
excellence, — the publication of this volume. 

The event may seem a very minor one to call for so labored 
a notice. But it is in fad: one event of many of like quality, 
and all of them taken together are ample evidence to the think- 
ing Newarker, and we trust to the refleftive outlander as well, 
that our city has found itself. Perhaps it is proper to add that 
the members of the Carteret Club all feel that, in turning their 
resources to the publication of this volume, they may take pride 
in the fad: that it suggests the presence in their new city of 
a certain excellent quality of desire and a certain pardonable 
love of appreciation of its finer ambitions. 

John Cotton Dana 

'^he Free Public Library 

Newark, Nezv Jersey 

Avgust, igij 



3^EWAI^K^ 




^ T)EFINITIO:Ni OF TICTUT{ESQU6 

IT was M. Jourdain, was it not, who had been speaking prose 
all his life without knowing it? Like him, a good many 
American towns and cities have achieved piduresqueness with- 
out knowing it, certainly without planning for it. Chief among 
them all, of course, is New York, especially that part of it on 
the southern end of Manhattan Island. No growth of wind- 
sown forest trees could be more unpremeditated, more at the 
mercy of natural whim or chance, than the forest of sky-scrapers 

[ 3 ] 



which distinguishes downtown New York from every city on 
the globe. They resuhed from the discovery that strudural steel 
could be employed indefinitely in upright constru6lion, and 
each building rose according to immediate economic needs 
or capacities, quite independent of its neighbors. For a gen- 
eration architeds worked blindly on the problem of giving 
style and beauty to strudures so revolutionary in shape, for 
there was a desire to achieve style and beauty; but meanwhile 
the cliff wall had to rise, whether or no, the towers had to 
cHmb to pierce the sea-fog driving in. The first impression of 
Lower Manhattan, as you see it from far down the Bay, rising 
like a dream city of fantastic minarets out of the water, is one 
of almost Oriental unreality; it might be some Constantinople 
of the western world with the East River as the Golden Horn. 
The next impression as you draw nearer and the lights and 
shadows of the canoned streets emerge, the individual win- 
dows are pricked out giving a scale by which to estimate the 
tremendous height of these mortared mountains and precipices, 
is one of overwhelming bigness ; you forget the pidorial, awed 
by the titanic power represented. But the third impression, 
gained especially if you sail around on the two rivers or view 
the town from one of the sky-flung bridges, is closely akin to 
your impression of a high mountain range, a huddle of peaks 
below you when you climb to some lofty summit on the Great 
Divide; here is a wild and tumbled and essentially pidorial 

C 4] 



\A t>efinitio:n^ of tictu^esqus 

group of up-ended stone piles and shadow-filled gorges with- 
out design and without unity. They were heaved up by a care- 
less earth shudder. It is not necessary to assume that a city is 
most successful when it thus simply happens; but there can 
be no question that such casualness may produce something 
picturesque, with a quality of surprise and contrast unknown 
to the formal design and the regulated square. 

" Piduresque " is an abused word, of course, and perhaps 
should be re-defined for our purpose before we approach New- 
ark. To the average man to-day, it is to be feared, picturesque 
means pretty, or at the least, quaint. It connotes in landscape 
such scenes as the water-color artists who sit all day in Kew 
Gardens love to paint, or in architecture vine-covered cottages 
or mouse-gray Colonial farmhouses with hollyhocks in the 
dooryard. But we would use the word in a more literal sense; 
we would mean by picturesque the quality in a scene which 
makes it essentially pictorial, a subjeCt for those devices of the 
graphic arts whereby contrasted spaces of color, or masses of 
shadow, or interesting outlines, are put upon paper or canvas 
and there produce a pleasing effeCt. It might be urged that, in 
this sense, any scene whatever is picturesque to the great artist, 
who will create a masterpiece when contemplating a dead fish 
on a platter, no less than a Matterhorn against the sky. In- 
deed, more successful paintings have been made of dead fish 
than of mighty mountains, the mountains to date having sue- 

[ 5 : 



cessfully defied the art of man adequately to render them ! To 
this we can only reply that the scales on a fish's side are no 
less wonderful than the green glimmers in glacier ice; they 
are exadly what we mean by pidorial. Emerson somewhere 
speaks of the beauty to be found in the little erosion channels 
made by rain-water running down a pile of cinders. And the 
seeker for the truly pidorial, approaching Newark with open 
and unprejudiced eye, may find in this formless and chaotic 
hive of modern industrialism immediate pidluresqueness. 

Let us leave the Hudson Tube train at Harrison, and walk 
along southward for a few rods, till we stand near the end of 
the fence enclosing the Ordnance Department of the United 
States Steel Works. In front of us is a scarred and littered open 
field, sloping down to the muddy green river. In winter the 
pidorial efFedl is considerably heightened when this field is 
a patch of white, darkening the water so that the curve of the 
stream seems to have been laid into the pidure with one long 
stroke of a brush heavily loaded with thick, oily paint. Off 
to the right of the field stand two huge gas tanks, one of the 
few struftures reared by man that can never be disguised. We 
make a railroad station to look like the baths of Caracalla, or 
a church to resemble a Greek temple, or a business block to 
ape a Gothic cathedral, but a gas tank is always a gas tank. It 
is always cylindrical, it is almost invariably painted red, and 
its only chance for variation is a fludluation in height between 

[ 6 ] 



«y/ View of [Newark from fiarrison 



^ T>EFINITI03^ OF TICTUT{ESQU8 

the slender uprights which enclose it. It is a simple, massive, 
ugly thing, which somehow contrives to fit into an industrial 
scene with a fine gesture of squat finality. I must admit a great 
personal fondness for gas tanks — in their proper place, of 
course. 

Certainly their proper place is in this picture we are now 
looking upon. For across the open field and the dark, oily river 
the water-line of Newark piles up in a rich, tumbled confu- 
sion of outline and shadow. Over there on the bank is a tall 
brick chimney, and then a long black roof with several short 
stacks like a dirty tramp steamer, and then another chimney, 
a big black coal pocket, another gas tank, and black smoke 
pouring forth and feathering across the composition, and at 
one side the bright red brick end of a building, with white 
snow on its roof, thrusting its warm color note into the pic- 
ture. Here we have an interesting saw-tooth outline along the 
roofs, depths of shifting shadow in and under the smoke, a 
triangle of bright color against the prevalent blacks and grays. 
But we have more. Look into the next plane of perspe6tive, 
just over the roof-line, and see a distant church spire beyond 
the chimney, and beyond the gas tank and the smoke plume 
the tall business blocks of the city standing up and taking the 
sun on their walls and windows. Look once more into the 
third plane of perspedive, and beyond the spire and the busi- 
ness blocks, beyond the vague sprawl of the city sweeping up 

C 7 J 



:h(^EWAI(K^ 




m^^^^'^'^^^^^- 



the hill, see the far green wall of the Orange Mountains laying 
their long, hazy horizontals against the sky! 

That is a glimpse of the Newark of to-day, from a spot 
across the river not far from the landing-place of the first set- 
tlers, who looked upon quite another scene. Robert Treat and 
his fellow Puritans sailed up a stream which was pure and 
clear, past half-submerged marshes, till the banks grew higher 
and firmer and the virgin forests began to come down to the 
water's edge, with pleasant open glades between. No doubt that 
in the common use of the word it was a more piduresque 
prospect they looked upon. Yet, in another sense, it was far less 
so. Certainly it had nothing of the unique flavor the present 
prosped possesses, nothing of the jumbled outlines, the rich and 
shifting play of light and shade, the strongly contrasted planes 
of perspeftive, the suggestiveness which comes from any con- 

c 8 : 



^ T)EFINITIO^ OF TICTU1{ESQU8 

templation of the piled-up evidences of man's energy. Here 
is a composition as casual and chaotic as anything on Lower 
Manhattan Island; no less surely did this city as we see it here 
"just grow." It is smooched with the smoke of modern in- 
dustrialism, and does not tell in quite the hard sea light which 
so often beats pitilessly on New York. It is not nearly so im- 
mense, and obviously no architeds concerned themselves with 
the effort to make these factories beautiful, or even dignified. 
Yet the hand of the etcher twitches for his needle, the artist 
sees the sun smite the tall buildings in the middle distance into 
towers of high light and he rejoices, even the layman pauses 
to watch the dark smoke plume cast a shadow over the oily 
river or blur the outline of a factory roof, and to let his eyes 
wander to the distant line of dreaming hills. Can we deny to 
such a scene the adjedtive "piduresque"? 

As you draw near the water front of old Marblehead or 
Gloucester, you see the little wharves, the gray wharf-houses, 
the fishing boats gently rocking their spars on the lazy heave 
of the green water, the crooked, narrow streets climbing up 
the hill. This is piduresque, surely. I once knew an artist who 
tried to paint in the Berkshires, and gave it up. He could find 
more subjeds for his pencil in an hour along the wharves of 
Marblehead, he declared, than he could find in a month in 
the panoramic vales and under the long, level hills of Berk- 
shire, which never " cut out " a scene for him and gave him 

C 9 ] 



interesting detail. It might be noted that Whistler, as etcher, 
preferred the Thames banks to the Lake Country. But old gray- 
wharves and fishing smacks, while they may be admittedly more 
romantic, are no more essentially piftorial, devoid of what are 
in reality literary implications, than soft coal smoke, foundry 
chimneys, a red brick fadory gable, a gas tank, a coal pocket, 
a dirty lighter, and in the middle distance the tall shaft of a 
sky-scraper made fantastic by the sun. These are things which 
we must learn if we would win a genuine graphic art out of 
our industrial America. It amounts to little if we produce men 
who can paint pretty pidures of rose gardens when we are not 
living in a land of rose gardens but of machine shops. We must 
find what is pidorial in the machine shop, for until we have 
learned to do that we shall have no genuine, no vital sense of 
the pidorial at all, and so no vital impulse to bring the pido- 
rial into our daily lives. 



C 10 : 








TH6 STELL OF "BTiOAT) STKEET 

I AM not a resident of Newark, nor am I even intimately- 
acquainted with its history or its present Hfe. If I were, 
perhaps I should not have been asked to write this book, for 
I could not have brought to the task that freshness of vision 
and detachment of view which I now can claim because, for 
me, the city's various pidorial manifestations are not clouded 
with other associations, social, historical, sentimental. If I were 
a Newarker, for example, I doubt very much whether I could 
enter the old burying ground behind the First Church with- 
out such a feeling of rage at the indifference which has allowed 
the gravestones to disintegrate when a little coating of paraf- 



fine would probably have saved them, that I could not give so 
much as a thought to the beauty of the church or the quaint, 
stale peace of the enclosure, drowsing close to the living hum 
of the Four Corners. I am considerably enraged as it is, be- 
cause the names in that burying ground sound so like the 
voting list in my home town in New England. I am sure some 
of them must be relatives of mine ! 

The First Church itself, which stands between a sky-scraper 
and one of those modern horrors, a huge advertising sign, in 
spite of the fad that it is built of the native brownstone never 
seen in Colonial New England, represents that fine flower of 
simple, dignified, beautifully proportioned Colonial architec- 
ture which bloomed in the last two decades of the eighteenth 
century and began to wither not long after the War of 1812. 
Situated in the commercial heart of the city, even as Trinity 
Church is situated in New York, it seems to a New Eng- 
lander much more a thing familiar and his own. That grace- 
ful spire might rise over the elms of half a hundred towns east 
of the Connefticut River — and does! Yet the massive, grace- 
ful building has a softness of texture in its brownstone walls, 
and wears a pattern made by the joining, which give it that 
Philadelphian touch, even that Southern note, so curiously 
charaderistic of old Newark, a town settled by New England 
Puritans, dominated by them for a hundred and fifty years, yet 
never quite theirs. Cross the marshes from New York, putting 

C 12 ] 



THB STELL OF "B^OATD STI^EET 

the three rivers behind, and something in the air, or the red 
soil, or the winds from the south, subtly affeds you. It affeded 
the earliest settlers of Newark, grim Calvinists though they 
were. They laid out Broad Street on an ample plan ! You may 
tell somebody else if you like that Treat and his company 
brought this plan with them from Connefticut, but don't tell 
me, for I know better. No street as wide as that was ever 
conceived east of the Hudson River or north of Newark Bay ! 
There is a sense of leisureliness, of spaciousness and hospital- 
ity, about it, even a dim perception, perhaps, of the pageantry 
of a wide thoroughfare and the stateliness of its long perspec- 
tive, which is not Puritan ; it belongs to a warmer clime than 
New England. 

Broad Street, of course, is Newark's finest possession, espe- 
cially the southern stretch from the Four Corners to Lincoln 
Park. Here, in spite of the pathetic disfigurements of trade 
and the tentative intrusion of certain tall ofSce buildings, you 
have a sense of low, level building-line, of archite6tural mel- 
lowness, above all of human values. In the canon slits of New 
York human values are entirely lost. You never feel like throw- 
ing out your chest and breathing deep and strolling along the 
walk like a figure fully conscious of its proper scale in the 
landscape. Your scale is that of the ant to the pyramid. But 
on Broad Street man is scaled to the three stories essential to 
well-regulated domestic life, the sun floods all the space from 

c 13 : 



doorstep to opposite doorstep, the sky-line is domestic and 
serene. One end of the vista, to be sure, is flanked by tall 
monstrosities which seem to be attempting a rather pathetic 
imitation of New York and are adlually achieving an imitation 
of Atlanta, Georgia ; but if you look the other way, you know 
why Paris is called the most beautiful of cities, you under- 
stand why the architect of Washington put green squares to 
close his vistas, your eye is soothed and satisfied with the low, 
level sky-line, and your imagination is stirred by the too fast 
fading relics of a sedate and prosperous domesticity. 

We are a nation where every man is as good as every other 
man, or a little better, and his plot of ground is his own 
property. Yet we have already discovered that this assumption 
will not always work. Colledively we insist that he screen his 
stable, properly dispose of his garbage, and connedt his house 
with the municipal sewer. Frank B. Sanborn, of Concord, the 
last of the Transcendentalists, was perhaps the last to yield 
to the demands of the sewer commissioners, much to the per- 
plexity of his fellow townsmen. These matters affe6l the pub- 
lic health. But I wonder if the public health of Newark does 
not also depend, to a greater extent, or in a subtler way, than 
many guess, on the sunny serenity, the low, human sky-line, the 
spacious comfortableness, of Broad Street ? If that street could 
be such a refreshment to me, a stranger, coming into it again 
after a long tramp over the hills above and through the tene- 

C 14 n 



'Broad Street 



THS STELL OF "BT^OATD STJ^EET 

ments and fadories below, if it could cause me, as it did, to 
square my chest and fill my lungs and ease my muscles into 
a contented saunter, of how much more value must it be to 
those who dwell always pent in the city ? If it is a crime for 
a stable-keeper to let loose a swarm of flies to walk across your 
butter and introduce germs into your system, is it not also 
a crime for a real estate owner to ered a fifteen story building 
on this street, where it will break the peaceful perspedive, cut 
off a part of the sunlight, put you out of the mood of serenity 
into the mood of hurry, poison your soul ? It seems to me so, 
at any rate. If Newark's waterfront is pifturesque in its chaos 
and unplanned industrialism, Broad Street south is piduresque 
because of its architedural formality, its low, unbroken hori- 
zontals, its ruled and spacious plan. It is a precious possession 
any city might be proud of, and any break in its sky-line, any 
destrudion of the architedure of the past century which gives 
it a mellow flavor, to supplant the old with some hideous new 
commercial front or motion pidure facade, must make the 
heart of the Newarker bleed, if he loves his city and does not 
merely mean, by loving it, that he likes to boast of the number 
of its fadories or the size of its bank deposits. 

Perhaps it is inevitable that the old houses go, and with 
them those quaint gardens behind, into which one may peep 
if he turns aside down one of the side streets to the east, which 
for a block maintain the calm, dignified air of long established 

I 15 ] 



domesticity, of red brick and green trees and quiet comfort. 
But is it too much to insist that the municipal skj-hne be kept 
intad, when such sky-hne is essential to civic beauty, or that 
in certain spots an architedural standard be maintained ? Sup- 
pose, for example, all the new commercial fronts on Broad 
Street had to be construded of brick, or of stone hke that used 
in the First Church, and had to conform, within reasonable 
limits, to a certain architedural standard obviously determined 
by the style of the church and the older dwellings. Why, New- 
ark would have a street, though entirely given over to business, 
which would be the pride of the whole country! With its wires 
underground, its trees in leaf, its green park at the southern 
end and at the other the busy Four Corners, it would be a bit 
of Paris stemming from the flank of American industrialism, 
and far from working ultimate hardship to anybody, it would 
be an aftual financial as well as a spiritual asset. Is America 
so young, so crude, so incapable as yet of cooperation, that it 
cannot bring such a dream to birth ? I cannot believe it. Cer- 
tainly Newark has the chance, if ever city had. 

Lincoln Park is one of those happy spots which we are 
learning no city can get along without. Where we have grown 
so carelessly that they do not exist, we are now undoing our 
mistakes, at great cost, and clearing away buildings to get a 
chance at the sun. No American city has enough of them, 
except our national capital. Boston is fortunate in its Com- 

[ i6 :\ 



THE STELL OF 'BT{OAT> STJ^EET 

mon and Public Garden ; indeed, Boston Common pradically 
"makes" the city. New York has shamefully negleded its too 
few open squares, using them as dumps for subway material 
and bad statuary, or cutting them up with senseless paths and 
taking no advantage of the light and space for architedural 
display. Union Square, for example, is surrounded by sweat- 
shops and loft buildings. Newark has been wiser. The superb 
horseman above Lincoln Park looks down on real grass and 
flourishing trees, he sees dignified houses, a striking church, 
which may or may not be beautiful but which is certainly 
settled comfortably into the scene, a few bits of Colonial, and, 
before long, he will see the new Memorial Building. He him- 
self, to be sure, is an alien- but it is perhaps better to flank our 
public squares with copies of foreign masterpieces than with 
the commemorative monstrosities which disfigure so many 
American cities. The Civil War freed the slaves, but it un- 
loosed on the country an army of soldiers' monuments which 
seem doomed to flaunt us with their bronze or stony terrible- 
ness till the end of time. The horrors of war do not cease on 
the battlefield ! So let us call that splendid horseman from the 
Renaissance a bit of the museum strayed out of doors into its 
proper setting of space and green trees, and rejoice as we walk 
around it to see how, from every angle, it is in vital motion 
and harmonious composition. One would suppose that daily 
contemplation of such a perfed work might in time affed the 

C 17 3 



:NiEWAKK^ 




taste even of an American municipal art commission. Think 
of certain civic statues in this country — "Sunset" Cox sig- 
nahng an Astor Place car in New^ York, for example, or Walter 
Scott guarding the Mall in Central Park, or those two ridic- 
ulous figures supporting the lamp post in front of the New^ark 
Public Library; and then compare them vv^ith the Colleoni. 
Yes, there is something to be said for replicas! 

There is no chance of my getting away from South Broad 
Street in this chapter, for on retracing my steps toward the 
Four Corners I turned east down Kinney Street a moment 

C i8 ^ 



THE STELL OF "B^OATf STREET 

to look at the fine old Doric church, with its surroundings 
of pretty houses and trees, and then was tempted once more 
into the burial ground behind the brownstone meeting-house. 
Perhaps it was the call of my ancestors I heard. On one side 
was a low line ot brick buildings, on the other the railroad 
embankment. The leafless trees were dank and dark with a re- 
cent rain. The steady roar of traflic from the busy Four Corners 
seemed to be muffled, as if the sound came through closed 
doors. I went from rotting stone to rotting stone, reading the 
names — Crane, Woodruff, Harrison, Canfield, Kingsland, 
Hays, Martin, Pennington, Halsted, Camp, Ticknor, Clapp, 
Cook, Baldwin, Foster, and so on. No history of Newark could 
tell me so vividly that in Colonial days it was a Puritan town. 
The lettering on some of the earlier stones is very lovely, de- 
signed with a free hand and beautifully spaced on the slab, 
though the extraordinarily lat-cheeked and narrow-skulled 
cherubs carved above betoken a better acquaintance on the 
part of the stone-cutter with the alphabet than with the angelic 
hosts — at least, I hope so. Some of the best work is done on 
the stones commemorating the wives of Alexander Eagles — 
Eleda, who died in 1771, aged twenty-one, and Esther, who 
died in 1786, aged thirty-five. When Alexander himself died 
I could not tell, for the entire front had crumbled off" what 
would appear to have been his stone. But Thomas Eagles, 
evidently his father, died in 1783, at the age of seventy-four, 

c 19 : 



having, like his son, buried two wives, Rachel in 1734, aged 
twenty, and Lois in 173^, aged thirty-one. Here, in two gen- 
erations, were four wives, not one of whom had survived her 
thirty-fifth year. Perhaps the Pilgrim mothers have not received 
their full due from history. As I came out of the curious, stale 
peace of the old burial ground, where the roar of the world 
was muffled and the ghosts of the Puritan dead lived in their 
Yankee names, assembled here in a quaint exclusiveness of 
crumbling stones, I ran full into the tide of noonday traffic, 
the throngs of shoppers, the groups of short-skirted, laughing 
girls, cut, it seemed, too much on the same pattern, but deli- 
ciously self-reliant and alive to the life about them. I watched 
them go past in two and threes, these girls who work, who 
work it may well be for too small a wage and for too long 
hours, but who at least have tasted economic independence; 
and I found more pleasure in watching them than in think- 
ing of the wives of Alexander and Thomas. They will have 
more to say about the future than the Puritan mothers did. So 
I followed two of them (they wore white-topped boots and 
Tommy Atkins hats, and chewed gum in a businesslike, pas- 
sionless manner) out into the swirl of the Four Corners, and 
the next chapter. 



C 20 ] 




T 



^JROU^NiP TH8 FOUT{^ COT{NET{S 

"^HE best view of the Four Corners is possibly to be had 
from the steps of the Essex County Court House, some 
distance away. What a change the centuries have wrought! 
Here, where the first settlers centred their village, is still the 
heart or hub of the city, but from a scene of quiet village hus- 
bandry it has grown to a swirl and confusion of multiple mod- 
ern life. Looking down Market Street from the doors of the 

C 21 ] 



Court House, you see Newark less as an individual city and 
more as an American type. The tall buildings, of course, have 
much to do with this. In the first place, they reduce the street 
to a canon slit, the bottom at most hours of the day in shadow, 
with striking planes of high light on the upper stories and, 
when the air is smoky or hazed, geometrical pencils of sun- 
shine striking in from a cross street. Such effe6ts, naturally, 
are seen at their greatest pitch in Lower New York, but Chi- 
cago has them, and Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh, and in lesser 
degree many other American cities. The swarm of pedestrians 
moving along on the walks in the shadow at the bottom of the 
canon are ant-like in their density and their sombre coloring, 
until somewhere they pass across a patch of sunshine, and then 
the colors leap out from the women's hats and dresses, and faces 
flash white. Flags high aloft and the myriad shop windows 
along the curb supply additional color, while in Newark espe- 
cially the big orange-yellow trolley cars, moving slowly along 
the centre of the way, keep the color note prominent. It is this 
bright, animated stream of life, in ceaseless motion, now black 
with shadow, now flashing into color, forever pouring through 
the bottom of a canon which displays the shifting lights and 
shades of Nature's handiwork together with flags and glittering 
window-panes and gilded signs of man's making, that consti- 
tutes the peculiar feature of American commercial cities. 

But this view from the Court House porch in Newark has 

C 22 ] 



^KOU:NiD TH8 FOUT{^ COT{NET{S 

certain features, too, which are different, and which suggest 
still further possibilities of development, noted by the City 
Plan Commission. For example, if you stand on the top steps 
and look toward the north, just across the street you will see 
the apse of a brownstone church coming into the pidure. As 
the church faces away from the city, up the hill, this apse is 
based well down the terrace, and seems unusually slender and 
high, an architedural detail thrusting into the view sugges- 
tively, as though around the corner a great hill might go up. 
If this effed: can be achieved on one side of the Court House, 
doubtless something equally good could be achieved on the 
other. Furthermore, with the proposed park boulevard sweep- 
ing down into Market Street at the base of the church apse, 
a third corner would be released for architedural treatment, 
and a vista opened, besides, for additional adornment. Here, 
in other words, is a spot on a natural elevation, commanding 
a view down into the charaderistic cafion of the commercial 
town, which might most happily be treated as a civic centre, 
and the graces of a more monumental and low-scaled archi- 
tedure applied both to heighten the contrast with our typical 
cliff-wall style and to afford the spiritual relief we need from 
too close and prolonged association with that style. Here the 
Civic Arts would look down at Business, as it were, and Busi- 
ness would look up to them, each true to its type and each 
visibly unforgetful of the other. 

C 23 ] 



Descending the Court House steps, I was struck anew with 
the way in which the seated Lincoln seems to settle down into 
a hole when viewed from above. Reaching its side, I expe- 
rienced as keenly as the first time I saw it a certain shock, 
difficult to define and certainly in no way attributable to hero 
worship. It is not the idea of placing the bronze likeness of 
a great democrat familiarly on a bench by the walk that hurts 
me, as if he were waiting for a trolley car (the day being hot 
he has taken off his hat, but seems to be sitting on his hand- 
kerchief) ; it is rather the belittling of art, the sacrifice to a 
somewhat far-fetched and trivial literary idea of the real em- 
phasis of sculpture. Properly to exhibit a painting, you need 
naked wall space ; the " eloquent blank wall " around a lovely 
door or window is an integral part of the architeftural effed ; 
and the elevation, the isolation, the fore- and background ot 
a piece of sculpture are equally important. Even the intimate 
garden statue stands a little aloof behind the nodding lark- 
spur or across the dimpled fountain pool. A certain dignity of 
aloofness belongs to bronze, if none to Abraham Lincoln. 
When I saw a large man sit upon the flanking bench, remove 
his hat too, and wipe his brow, I could not fail to note that from 
a few steps away he was almost as impressive as the statue. My 
sense of fitness was jolted, and I made a little prayer that when 
Newark builds its civic centre around this spot, a better setting 
will be found for the lank bronze martyr. 

C 24 1 



'Broad Street at Militarij "Park 



^JROU^NJJ THE FOU'B^CO'RNE^S 

North Broad Street, as soon as you have broken clear of 
the sky-scrapers at the Four Corners, is in its different way as 
unique a possession as the southern stretch, giving to the city 
a present flavor and a future opportunity either to keep that 
flavor or to create something new that shall still be fine and 
distindlive, such as few American cities possess. Must the old 
City Market go ? It will be a great loss, surely, from the pic- 
torial standpoint, not as great, perhaps, as the loss of Faneuil 
Hall to Boston, but sad enough. So long as the water remains 
in the canal, it is possible to go west a block or two and look 
down over the dark, quiet mirror of the canal, between walls 
of brick and a jumble of shop gables and back windows like 
an old-world etching, and see the stream of traffic on the Broad 
Street bridge cutting a horizontal across the pidure, while just 
beyond rises the quaint red end of the Market. Doubtless the 
canal will have to be drained before many years, and the Market 
replaced by a more modern strudure; but one of the most pic- 
turesque bits of Newark, in the popular sense ot the word, will 
disappear. The Market itself, and the open square to the south, 
with its rough cobblestones, its chaos of carts, its hum of bar- 
ter, and the row of low, rambling brick buildings on the oppo- 
site side, with their sidewalk canopies and dingy windows, are 
curiously southern in flavor, or at least Philadelphian. There 
is something more than the age of these old buildings facing 
the Market square, and the rough pavement, which gives the 

C 25 ] 



^JiJEWAKK^ 




spot its charm. The sidewalk canopies suggest a hotter sun than 
New England knows, and there is just a touch of laziness for 
all the hum and bustle, of negligence and that happy attitude 
which forgets a jolt or a dingy window more easily than it 
remembers an impulse to alter matters. I recall a certain main 
street in a Virginia city which is so like the row of buildings 
facing the Market parking space that the photographs might 
almost be interchangeable. Perhaps that is why my fancy carries 
the resemblance still farther. Yet I like the southern touch 
in the older Newark, and I like to think of the stock of the 
Puritans made at least a little leisurely by another environ- 
ment, and perhaps a little less concerned over their souls as well 
as their cobblestones ! 

C 26 -} 



^ROU:NiD THE FOU%^ CO%NET{S 

Beyond the Market is the Mihtaiy Green, the Boston Com- 
mon of Newark, and one of the city's finest assets. It is a splen- 
did thing that in the very heart of town you can walk out of 
your office, your store, your hotel, your train, into a wide, spa- 
cious, sunlit park, with grass and trees to cool you with their 
greenery, and amid the modern buildings the architedural rec- 
ords of an older day still visible reminders of the city's past. 
Inevitably, the visitor thinks of the Green at New Haven, with 
its three churches in the centre, and flanking it both the struc- 
tures of the new city and the old, both tall hotels and banks 
and court houses, and white Colonial dwellings with their 
dainty porches. It was, no doubt, the same pioneer necessity 
which prescribed these central drill grounds, and perhaps one 
of the Newark settlers from the New Haven Colony may have 
had the mother settlement in mind when Newark was estab- 
lished. Such an explanation certainly seems reasonable to the 
visitor. But for lack of proper encouragement, Newark might 
even boast to-day its college as well, on one side of the green, 
what is now Princeton matching Yale. It does boast at least 
one church of the fine "meeting-house" type (a little hurt 
by the pointed windows), set amid the greenery, and it still 
shows a sprinkling of old residences facing the sunny spaces. 

Two of the best of these residences are on either flank of 
the Hudson Tunnel station at the northeast corner — one a 
square block of a house curiously suggestive of Newburyport, 

C 27 1 



the other adorned with wrought iron balconies Hke an old 
dwelling in Greenwich Village. Both houses are sound in de- 
sign and should unquestionably be preserved. It is a pity that 
the station between them is such a formless and ugly struc- 
ture, when a little care could have harmonized it with its sur- 
roundings. I was led to the Central New Jersey station on South 
Broad Street, to be shown an example of utter architectural 
depravity; but to me that structure, externally at least, has a 
character of its own, even though it resembles the facade of a 
circus wagon. The Tube station is utterly without charafter of 
any sort, and is further disfigured by a great, ugly sign, which 
might just as well have been placed twenty-five feet back on 
the roof, against a clerestory, permitting the bow of the build- 
ing, where it thrusts in between the two old dwellings, to be 
treated as a Colonial entrance. How long is it to be before 
our towns and cities exert a legitimate authority over their sky- 
lines and their streets and squares, demanding that intelligent 
cooperation which alone can achieve municipal orderliness 
and beauty? The Military Green of Newark is a precious spot, 
jealously to be guarded from ever present dangers. 



C 28 -] 




^ "BIT OF VII^Gi:Ni RIVET{-'B^NI^ 

BROAD Street bends beyond Trinity Church, keeping, 
however, its spacious charader, its sunny ampHtude, and 
soon brings the pedestrian into Washington Park, another green 
triangle of which the city may well be proud. But, alas, that 
the Father of his Country should also have been the father of 
so much of his country's statuary ! The Washington who has 
dismounted from his horse at the entrance to this park, per- 
haps to permit the steed better to remove the fly from his off 
front knee, is doubtless not the worst memorial to our first 
President, but that is because it was not the earliest. It is an 

C 29 : 



unfortunate piece of statuary, surely, and we prefer to look, 
beyond it to the white Colonial house on the western side of 
the park, with its suggestion of Portsmouth along the roof- 
line and upper story, its suggestion of the South in its high 
brick basement wall and its extended porch. North from this 
old dwelling rises the "toothpick" spire, an odd and domi- 
nating landmark, and then the Free Public Library and Mu- 
seum, which is a solid, dignified pile best seen, perhaps, if 
you go out of the Park down Bridge Street, and then turn 
back not far from the corner. From this point you can screen 
out the advertising sign beside the library, and the building 
faces you squarely as if welcoming you to the city. A touch of 
green will come into the pifture, the limbs of a tree, perhaps, 
oddly reproducing the sprawl of wires on the pole just over 
your head. Behind you the road drops down to the river and 
the iron bridge ; you climb up from commerce to this green 
square and this house of the arts. The thought no less than 
the adual prosped is a pleasant one. 

As you continue north on Broad Street, probably the next 
pidure to strike your fancy is just beyond the Lackawanna 
bridge, where the quaint little brownstone parsonage of the 
House of Prayer sits on its noisy corner, like a bit of some lost 
Arcady, and a sweet-faced old lady is always looking out of the 
window. It seems incredible that in this cottage the invention 
was conceived which made the motion pidures possible, those 

[ 30 ] 



^ "BIT OF VII^GI^Mi RIVET^^'B^NK^ 

twitching, hedic, mechanical modern substitutes for the lovely 
art of the drama. I feel sure that if the inventor had foreseen 
the real scope of his invention, he would have secretly de- 
scended the cellar stairs and consigned his work to the flames 
of the furnace. The parsonage is built of the local brownstone, 
so irregularly hewn that the pattern of the walls is almost as 
delightfully inconsequential as a jigsaw puzzle. The roof has 
a double pitch, which may also be seen in an ancient wooden 
building across the road, and this shouldered roof-line gives to 
the dwelling a note of quaintness and distin6lion. The porch 
is simple and good, and the heavy old vine which clambers up 
the rear is a refreshing green note in a drab and dirty corner 
of the town. May its roots never lack for moisture, nor the 
stones of the cottage crumble ! 

Broad Street goes on northward, still spacious and sunny, 
with the river never far away to the east, until at length it 
reaches the Mount Pleasant Cemetery. Personally, I confess 
a passion for cemeteries. There is something delightfully serene 
about them to me, and they are quiet without being in the 
least oppressive. They sprout granite slabs above the green grass 
and under the drooping trees like some fantastic garden, and 
because they are the homes of the dead they are well cared 
for and those who wander through them maintain a decent 
decorum. When I was a little boy, I trotted home from school 
every day through a cemetery, and came in time to feel an 

I 31 D 



adual acquaintance with many of the worthies whose names 
I read upon their stones, especially with a certain little girl, 
who was depicted in a white marble statue standing under a 
canopy. Her hands were crossed over her heart, she was smil- 
ing, and her button boots were much too large for her. Once, 
in the moonlight, I climbed up and touched her hands, and 
it seemed to my excited imagination that the smile grew softer 
on her marble lips. 

At any rate, when I came upon Mount Pleasant Cemetery I 
insisted that the artist, who has not this love for mortuary mon- 
uments and grassy graves, accompany me through its well-kept 
paths and under some of its really splendid trees, especially the 
beeches and the white birches which have unexpedledly thriven 
at this low altitude near the sea. We were rewarded by one of 
the most charming of all the prospects Newark has afforded 
us. I wonder how many Newarkers know that prosped — for 
sometimes one's very familiarity with his own city dims his 
exploring eye ? Mr. Frank J. Urquhart knows it, I am sure, for 
in his "A Short History of Newark" he mentions a feature 
of the view — the bit of primeval river-bank. 

You reach this prospect by following the main drive along 
the southern side of the cemetery, until it brings you to the 
top of the high bank above the Erie railroad tracks. Here, unless 
I am much mistaken, you will instindively pause, for the com- 
position before you is strangely arresting. In the foreground, 

I 32 3 



The %iyer-^ank 



^ "BIT OF VIJ^GI:AC J^IVE'JR^-'B^NJ^ 

rising out of the grass, are three or four sharp, saw-tooth tomb 
tops coming up from the bank below, an odd detail. Close to 
them a group of large and ancient tree-trunks spring upward 
and outward, like the ribs of a great fan with the foliage for 
the wind-catching surface. Below these trees the bank drops 
almost sheer for thirty feet to the railroad tracks, and imme- 
diately across the tracks is the river-bank, just at this point 
for two hundred yards or more undisturbed by pier or break- 
water or riprap. It has the flowing curve the river has carved for 
it, and it is overlaid with its ancient tangle of vines and weeds 
and grasses. It is a tiny bit of the virgin country, just as the 
first settlers found it. Beyond the yellow flow of the river, you 
see a factory on the opposite bank, a bit of life and color and 
modernity, with foliage about it and a hill beyond, and rising 
upward till you must glimpse its top through the green fan of 
these cemetery trees is a red brick chimney stack, a light and 
pleasant red blending sweetly with the misty leaves. Here are 
the quick and the dead, here is the new seen through a frame 
of the old, here is the modern railroad and the virgin river-bank, 
the new industrialism blending its color and its outlines with 
the green of Nature. 



: 33 ] 




TH8 CKOWD OF J^UM'BLB %pOFS 

IT was a rainy afternoon when we started on foot up Orange 
Street, seeking no definite objedive, but intent on whatever 
pidorial might befall us by the way. The first thing which 
we encountered was a small shop where ladders are made, not, 
you might suppose, a promising subjed. It is a plain, old-fash- 
ioned, low building, just a redangular block, and you might 
easily pass it without so much as a glance, unless you hap- 
pened to look above the roof-line; then you are captivated 
by a Hiroshige print impressed on the gray paper of the sky, 

[ 34] 



THE C^OWD OF j^LM'BLB %pOFS . 

but a trial print into which the figures have not yet been intro- 
duced. It is incomplete. By way of advertising their wares, this 
company has ereded a tall extension ladder, straight as a flag- 
pole, in the middle of the roof, and guyed it into rigid posi- 
tion with taut, slender wires. It reaches thirty or forty feet into 
the air, and on the topmost round a step-ladder mysteriously 
balances, between heaven and earth, like the coffin of the 
Prophet. No doubt you have seen one of those Japanese " fam- 
ilies " of acrobats come bouncing out upon a stage and begin 
to ereft ladders and poles into the air, up which they swarm and 
proceed to startle the audience with feats of balance at the top. 
Our commercial ladder shop has set its roof for just such a per- 
formance — only the stocky-legged little yellow men are lack- 
ing. It is a bit of quaint piftorial humor by the street side. 

We turned north across the foot bridge over the Lacka- 
wanna tracks presently, and were again arrested by a pidure. 
This time it was not Hiroshige of whom we were reminded, 
but Ruskin. Just where in Ruskin the passage occurs, I can- 
not say; like most other people to-day, I have not read him 
for years. But somewhere, probably in "The Seven Lamps of 
Architedure," he says that half the money now squandered 
on useless personal luxury would, if wisely employed, build 
a marble church in every town in England, to lift "its fair 
height above the purple crowd of humble roofs." That final 
phrase came word for word up out of the depths of my mem- 

C 2S 1 



oTj as I stood on the foot bridge over the tracks and saw the 
towers of the cathedral still in skeleton and gray against the 
rainy sky, lifting above the crowd of humble roofs which 
climbed the hill to their base. These were not purple roofs, to 
be sure, and probably only an extraordinary sunset would con- 
vert them to purple. They were drab roofs, picked out here 
and there by a red chimney. Neither did the lifting towers, on 
too minute an inspe<3;ion, give much promise of being fair. 
A leaden and degraded Gothic results from most of our imi- 
tations. But especially in their skeleton state they were a point 
of uplift and aspiration for the eye, and in the soft gray mist 
of rain they rose dreaming over the indubitably humble roofs 
like a shepherd above his flock. Crossing the bridge in front of 
us was an Italian woman wrapped in a brilliant orange shawl. 
On the shiny wet rails below a train thundered by, the loco- 
motive trailing a feather of white steam. Just across the tracks, 
cutting across the foreground in a long horizontal, was a street 
of little square wooden houses, facing out from the general 
mass of the composition behind, a street between them at the 
end of the bridge making the opening which led in amid the 
crowd of humble roofs. The pi6lure gathered together, as it 
were, and became a little city by itself, under the protedion of 
the skeleton gray towers. 

We wandered up through the Italian quarter, with its fre- 
quent bits of warm human color, till we were close to the 

C 36 ] 



TH6 C^OWD OF BUM'BLB "ROOFS 

skeleton cathedral, which, on nearer inspedlion, confirmed our 
worst suspicions as to its a6lual architeftural worth. Then we 
struck out in a general southwesterly direction, and it must be 
confessed spent a dismal two hours, even though the sun came 
out presently, and with the sun the children. We moved first 
through a region ot industry, small facSlories of many sorts mak- 
ing a scene suggestive, no doubt, of intense and varied activ- 
ity, but lacking here any pidorial appeal. Even the elimination 
of soft coal smoke in Newark is a pi6lorial loss. The smallest 
foundry or steel mill in Pittsburgh is a grove of black, naked, 
limbless trees beneath a pall of velvet smoke. However, that is 
hardly an argument for permitting the unregulated consump- 
tion of bituminous fuel in Newark! Pittsburgh pays a bitter 
price for its pidorial impressiveness. 

After we had crossed the old canal, which wanders useless 
and forlorn under roads and beneath back windows, dirty, full 
of old tin cans and miscellaneous refuse, the pathetic ghost of 
an elder day when life was more leisurely, we soon entered into 
a region of houses, street after street of houses, — ugly houses, 
crowded houses, dismal houses, with a nightmare similarity 
one to the other. As I have said, the sun came out, children 
crowded the curb, the last of the winter ice began to melt and 
run in dirty streams in the gutter. Spring was in the air. Yet 
we plodded along, block after block, trying now this street, 
now that, the impression of ugliness, of squalor, of a hopeless 

C 37 ] 



:njswai(K^ 







monotony, weighing us down. The artist never once took his 
sketch-book from his pocket. Truth to tell, his face wore an 
expression as if he were about to say, "Well, we 've got to see 
Newark, and this is part of Newark, so we might as well keep 
on." Adually, he said nothing at all. He just walked, and I 
walked at his side. The Newark Plan says much about hous- 
ing problems, and the city, no doubt, will meet these problems 
bravely. But how can it solve the merely aesthetic problem of 
raw ugliness and monotony? These houses are not old; if they 
only were, they would doubtless have some charm. Our grand- 
fathers builded better. Certainly the eye and the spirit hunger 
even more than for a green park or open square, in such a 
region, for the grace and beauty and refreshment of something 

1 38 : 



TH8 C^OWD OF /JUM'BLS T{OOFS 

architedurally brave and fine, something delicate and suave, 
something big and aspiring. In a city, parks and squares are 
not enough, after all, to meet the needs of man. He must have 
architedlural variety and relief, and especially he needs a touch 
of the old, the restful, the historic. This sedion of Newark is 
deficient both in parks and in architecture. All the way to the 
top of the ridge it is a mournful monotony that evokes in the 
beholder a profound pity for the workers who must make their 
homes here, and a profound uneasiness for the generation who 
are growing up amid such surroundings. 

Ultimately we reached a brewery. Breweries as a rule are not 
beautiful stru6lures, and they rise over the humble roofs with a 
somewhat more sinister suggestion than cathedral towers; but 
it was a relief to see anything rising up, to sense an architec- 
tural mass on which the eye could focus. We were greatly 
cheered by that brewery. We were cheered again presently, as 
we walked down West Kinney Street, by the glimpse into Prince 
Street. Here, at last, the artist once more tugged his sketch- 
book from his pocket. The piduresqueness of Prince Street, to 
be sure, is largely human — it resides in the piled push carts 
by the curb, the color and animation of the crowds, the bustle 
of Ghetto life. But it resides, too, in the touch of green from 
the trees, the rags dangling from the tangle of overhead wires, 
a tumbledown irregularity and sense of age in some of the 
buildings. 

[ 39 ] 



As we continued down West Kinney Street we were sud- 
denly, in one short block, out of one world into another, and 
found ourselves crossing High Street and soon after emerging 
into the spacious dignity of South Broad, where we looked 
eagerly at the ancient houses, and even crossed the way and 
walked down the block to the South Baptist Church, for the 
benediction of its grave brown Doric portico. Our walk was 
over for that day, and we were left with a speculation. It is use- 
less to ask or expe6l a modern industrial plant to achieve the 
architedural grace of a Greek temple, but is it unreasonable to 
ask that modern industrialism shall not befoul the surround- 
ing land with ugliness, that so much of its profits go back to 
its laborers as are necessary for attractive homes, clean streets, 
the legitimate appurtenances of a civilized society ? It is use- 
less to ask this just yet, I grant you. But it is not unreason- 
able. Indeed, nothing else is reasonable. Newark, as a city, is 
not to blame for that region up the hill. We, as a people, are 
to blame. Some day we shall wake from our sleep, and other 
cities besides Newark will lay the axe to ugliness and squalor. 



C 40 ] 



'^''//M'/Ojlliil,il/!l. 




IN TRAIS6 OF TI(EES if OTE:Ni STAGES 



^ II ^HE parks and squares of a city are its lungs. Their first 
-L purpose is, in the best sense, utihtarian, and whatever 
they can achieve of genuine landscape charm or rural wildness 
is merely so much added gain. Newark, of course, is fortunate 
in being so near the large mountain reservation on the hills 
to the west, but within the city limits are at least two large 

: 41 n 



areas cleared and cultivated as breathing spots, as lungs, with 
the heart of the city throbbing between them. They should, 
of course, be conneded by a properly treated boulevard or 
parkway, and such a connedion is planned. It is also planned 
to reach this conneded system by a parkway leading direftly 
out of the civic centre of the town. When these improve- 
ments are made, the two green areas on the north and south 
will thus be more integral a part of Newark, in the sense that 
even from the Four Corners, as it were, you will be aware of 
them, and it will be difficult to enter the city by any western 
or southern road without passing or crossing some green re- 
minder of Newark's acknowledgment to Nature. 

Pidorially, of course, a park is generally the least individ- 
ual part of a city, especially a large park. Some are more richly 
endowed with soil and trees and natural features like lakes or 
ravines than others ; but all display more or less the same in- 
evitable drives and walks and benches, with play fields and a 
pond, trees, keep-off-the-grass signs, and a greater or smaller 
number of miniature Greek temples or canopies or rustic shel- 
ters or other architedlural monstrosities which we seem to think 
are absolutely essential to a public reservation. Our park archi- 
tedlure is generally almost as bad as our soldiers' monuments, 
and much of it belongs to the same period. We see a pretty, 
doming summit, for example, and instead of leaving it a pretty, 
doming summit, as the Lord left it, to give us the sense of 

C 42 ] 



IN TI^AISS OF TI^EES (S OTE^J^ STAGES 

Nature's own lines, we have to clap a " summer house " or a 
pergola on the very top; or otherwise, no doubt, we shouldn't 
know it was a part of the park at all! 

There are municipal parks, however, which do achieve an 
individuality because ot their setting in relation to the town, 
the foreground they afford, as it were, or the contrast, to the 
city view. Weequahic Park is such a one, more now, perhaps, 
than it will be in another fifty years, when its trees have become 
larger and more numerous. There is a spot in the southeastern 
corner of Central Park in New York where you can see almost 
the entire Plaza Hotel refleded in the lake, a sky-scraper look- 
ing at itself in the mirror of a forest pool; and that is Central 
Park's most individual contribution. The contribution of Wee- 
quahic Park is the view from its highest points down over its 
own green slopes to the line of trees that bound it on the east, 
and then the long horizontals of the never ceasing trains, and 
then the grim bulwarks of the mills with their red chimney 
stacks, and then stretching away for miles the misty gray-green 
marshes growing hazier and hazier to the Bay. If the atmos- 
phere is very clear, perhaps you may sense far off, hanging 
like a mirage, the fairy towers of New York. And always, over- 
head, you are aware of the sky, great, doming leagues of sky, 
under which the long trains crawl and the marshes doze and 
the chimneys smoke and all the city to your left suns itself. 
You catch Newark in its geographical setting from Weequa- 

: 43 ] 



hie Park, the city detaches itself and lets you view it as a whole, 
even though you are not at its highest point. In that resped: 
the Park is pidlorially unique. 

But I confess a greater personal interest in the little parks 
and squares of a city than in its larger reservations, finding 
in them, perhaps, a better indication of the town's care for its 
citizens and certainly a more individualizing flavor. Even a bit 
of side street, however humble, if it is lined with trees which 
soften the line of house fronts and dimple even a dirty curb 
with light and shadow, is parklike in suggestion and a sign 
of civilization in small, intimate, personal ways, not purchased 
on a large scale by some munificent administration. When 
we consider the sad struggle a tree has for survival in a modern 
city, its natural nourishment poisoned, its supply of moisture 
cut off by brick and asphalt, its top attacked by linemen and 
preyed upon by insefts, the number of live and apparently 
healthy trees encountered on any walk through Newark is 
a source of perpetual surprise and admiration. Somebody has 
not blundered. Somebody, through changing administrations, 
has waged a good fight well. I have no idea who it is. Perhaps 
it is the Spirit of the City rather than any single individual or 
board. May that spirit never change, but increase, rather, its 
intensity ! For not only do these trees add to the charm of the 
smaller parks : they give a touch of green and softness, a variety 
of outline and boon of shadow, to many a drab corner and 

C 44 '] 



The CN^tvark Qolleoni^ Lincoln T'ark 



IN TRAISe OF T^EES if OTE^J^ STAGES 

otherwise ugly street; they even impart the comfortable village 
touch, the sense of a departed neighborliness and leisure, at the 
very heart of the humming modern town. I went so far in my 
enthusiasm one day as to contemplate a poem to "The Brave 
Trees of Newark." But I withheld my pen, and the reader 
shall be spared. After all, a tree by a city street is less the poetry 
of life than the gracious, kindly prose, falling a little rhythmi- 
cally, perhaps, like the whispering wind through the branches 
and the waltz that the hurdy-gurdy is playing just out of sight 
around the corner, its jangle softened by distance, its lilt pro- 
vocative of memories. 

I have spoken already of the three parks which open on 
Broad Street, adding further distindion to that splendid artery. 
Each has its peculiar flavor, and each is to some extent dom- 
inated by a church. It may be that I like the Military Green 
best because I like Trinity Church, and it may be that I like 
Trinity Church because it is a New England meeting-house ; 
which is another way of saying that we like those things best 
which are most familiar, whether they be parks or ideas ! But 
part of my liking for the Military Green, I am sure, comes from 
its proximity to the very centre of commercial activity. Con- 
trasts are stronger there than in the other parks, the old archi- 
tedure and the new are side by side, men and women hurry 
along the streets only to cross into the green spaces where the 
sun hits them and unconsciously saunter. It is curious how the 

c 45 : 



spirit of leisure comes over you when you come into the old 
drill ground, under the trees. Only the jitney 'buses bouncing 
by are never affefted. 

New^ark is probably proud of its parks, which compare well 
in number and area with those of other cities. Yet still there 
are not enough of them, of the smaller parks, I mean, which 
greet you with a green welcome as you come to the end of 
a street or turn a sudden corner, and which are the smaller 
lungs for the individual areas of population. It is a long and 
barren way, for instance, from the East Side Park to the West 
Side Park. A city which knows the charm of such oases as the 
three parks on Broad Street, and which has conceived its public 
schools on ample lines, with free space about them, and which 
cherishes its trees and watches carefully its multitudinous chim- 
neys against smoke pollution, will find a way in time, surely, 
to split off more flatiron corners into green enclosures and to 
put more playgrounds and breathing spots amid the conges- 
tion of dwellings which house the toilers — on whom, after 
all, the prosperity of the city rests. 



C 46 ] 




OVET{^ THE M^%SHES 



I 



"^HE Newark Marshes have been famous tor two cen- 
turies. Between the rock rib ot the PaHsades, as it dwin- 
dles down to the Bayonne peninsula, and the slopes ot the Or- 
ange Mountains lies a great waste of wild rice and water, two 
rivers, the Hackensack and the Passaic, descending through it 
and uniting to form Newark Bay. The entire width of this 
waste tradt, which extends for fifteen miles north and south, 
is about five miles. It must once have been a paradise for wild 

n 47 : 



duck. Snake Hill rises out of its midst, a rock bastion oddly like 
a miniature Gibraltar, and to-day it is crossed and recrossed, 
threaded up and down, with a vast spider web of railroad 
tracks, which straddle the rivers on iron bridges or wooden 
piles, which keep above the waving rice or the dismal sedge by 
cinder embankments, and which are companioned mile after 
mile by a veritable fence of advertising signs. So numerous are 
the railroads, indeed, so multiple the tracks, that the stranger 
crossing this waste land into Newark for the first time would 
probably have a more vivid sense of embankments and freight 
on the move than of great, level marshes and lazy tidewater 
under a pearl-gray sky. And to-day he would begin to pick 
up the fadlories sometime before his train crossed the Passaic 
on to solid land, or see across the northern platform at Man- 
hattan Terminal the long train-yards with their masses of red 
color shifting back and forth. 

The city is, indeed, creeping out across the marshes, reach- 
ing southeastward to the head of Newark Bay. Already the 
fa61:ories have thrown a skirmish-line of chimneys out into 
the sedge, and train-loads of cinders pass and repass, laying a 
through roadway to tidewater. Newark is by way of becom- 
ing an ocean port, with a harbor so landlocked that you come 
upon a deep-sea tramp with a start of surprise. The marshes 
between the present town and the Port of Newark will ulti- 
mately be filled in and built upon — fadories, warehouses, 

C 48 -] 



OVE'R^ TH8 M^%SHES 

dwellings, parks, schools, will take the place of the green 
stagnant pools and the tall, dry sedges, and piers will thrust 
out where now the shore-line is a fluid curve of tidal mud. 
It is bound to happen. But when it has happened, one of the 
most piduresque views of the city will have disappeared for- 
ever. 

It was one of those hazy days of early spring when we first 
went down to the Port, by what at present calls itself a road 
in hopeful recognition of what it doubtless will in time be- 
come. Not all the snow of winter had disappeared behind north 
walls, and the mud was inches deep as soon as we left the 
paved way. At such a time of year the litter of winter still lies 
on the wet ground, last year's grass and weeds are stretched 
out flat, brown and sodden, and even the loveliest garden may 
well look dreary. But in spite of such conditions there was an 
odd, brave charm to the plain wooden house which clung to 
the town's last edge and pushed a little grove of trees toward 
the marsh, enclosed in a fence and evidently used in summer 
as a beer garden. Close to this house was another, on a knoll 
of rising ground, just enough of a rise to drain the water off, 
and here, evidently, the occupant pursued agriculture in the 
shadow of the fadory chimneys, for every inch of his knoll 
had been ploughed, so that his house stood in the centre of 
a red circle, that red peculiar to Jersey. His last furrow was 
turned just above swamp-line, and from that point we picked 

[ 49 ] 



our way through the mud over the half-completed causeway, 
leading straight away for the Port. 

You do not have to go far along this road before you feel 
yourself a point in the exa6t centre of the flat circle enclosed 
by the horizon and the vast inverted bowl of the sky. Doubt- 
less my readers have all felt this sensation. It may come on 
a desert or a prairie, on the sea or at the summit of a high 
mountain. But always it is dependent upon a wide enough 
prosped to include the entire circle of the horizon, and a 
sense of the immanent heavens. You feel as if a plumb-line, 
dropped from the zenith, would strike you on the head. It is 
a spacious sensation, that brings the motor reaftion of squared 
shoulders, expanded chest, and lifted face, followed by a glow 
of physical exhilaration and well being. And on the Newark 
marshes, halfway or more to the Port, it is followed, too, by a 
realization of the unique piduresqueness of the view. I think 
there is no other such view anywhere. It might only be par- 
tially approximated at Gary, or some other prairie industrial 
city by a lake shore or great river. 

First, at your teet in all diredions lies the level marsh, dead 
brown or rusty green according to the season. Then, a mile 
or more away, already ringing you on every side, are the rail- 
roads, so adive that the long freight trains form a continuous 
line of dull red forever in motion and yet forever stationary. 
Beyond them, as you face the town, a quarter at least of the 

I so ] 



OVE\ TH6 M^T{SHES 

circle is filled with the tall stacks of Newark, each one spout- 
ing its lazy smoke plume like a strange flower on a slender 
stem. There is color in them, too, — the red of brick, the whites 
and grays and browns and even a sinister acid yellow of smoke, 
and in one case a great blotch of vivid Prussian blue, cover- 
ing the whole roof of the faftory below the tall stack. South- 
ward the line of chimneys continues, sweeping around through 
Elizabethport and growing hazy with distance. There is a 
break at the Bay's mouth, and then the tall stacks in Bayonne, 
outlined against the dim hills of Staten Island, take up the 
march. You see them over the waters of the Bay. Northward 
from them, there is the smoky mass of Jersey City, and only 
one short segment of the circle, where you look diredly up 
the marshes, without its ringing procession of chimney stacks 
and smoke plumes. Behind Newark itself lie the dreaming hills, 
and the whole city, a vague mass above the railroads and the 
fadories, seems climbing toward them. 

At the Port, on that first spring day, we found a red freighter, 
high out of the water, moored alongside the new pier, her 
refledion trembling in the oily, sage-green water. She seemed 
prophetic of the fleets that are to come, though just then she 
looked curiously lonely and out of place in here where there 
was no visible outlet to the sea whose batterings she plainly 
bore upon her paint-scarred sides. The pier head was deserted, 
but back along the road we had come the dump cars were 

[ 51 ] 



moving, building up the causeway above the black ooze of the 
marshes, and tiny figures were at work, mere specks beneath 
the great sky dome which covered marshes and Bay, the city 
and far hills, and made it seem almost incredible that these 
figures could so alter the face of Nature as they were busily 
intent upon doing. It was silent here, too, strangely silent. We 
could hear the beat of the gulls' wings as they swept the water 
close to the old red tramp, the little calls they uttered, the far, 
thin shriek of a locomotive whistle, the put-put of a motor boat 
by the Bayonne shore. 

Then we went back across the muddy, half-built cause- 
way, toward the strange garden of smoke flowers and the long 
line of dreaming hills. The sun was setting when we reached 
Broad Street. Shadows lay across the pavement, the crowds 
were homeward bound. The street was serene in the low light, 
and seemed to smile. "My fadories," it said, "have not be- 
fouled me, my people have not cut off my sun. I still show 
them squares of green, and the homes their fathers built. I am 
the other side of the tall stacks and the machines that melt 
and grind. I am the dignity that comes from labor, the grace 
that springs from a community united in ideals of cleanliness 
and justice. I am what is best in cities. I am the true soul of 
Newark." 

So, at least, I fancied the old street spoke, in the tramp 
of its homing throngs. May Newark, I thought in answer, be 

C 52 J 



always true to this her soul; and I cast a long farewell glance 
across the Military Green, dusking now with shadow, its paths 
picked out by moving lines of black pedestrians, and saw the 
last sweet gold of sunset behind the leafless tree-tops. 




Two hundred copies of this book were printed for The Carteret 'Book 
Club of ^M^warkj ^J\(ew Jersej/, in J\(ovember, 1917; the five fu//- 
page illustrations in color being printed by T(udolph Thizicka 
J^w Yorkj and the text and other illustrations by T). !S. Updike 
The JHerry mount Tress ^ Boston. 



